


Echoes of Heaven

by laulan



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-10
Updated: 2009-09-10
Packaged: 2017-10-10 23:06:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/105402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laulan/pseuds/laulan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The difference between Heaven and Earth. Castiel-centric, 411 words.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Echoes of Heaven

**Author's Note:**

> Supernatural is the property of Eric Kripke and the CW, not me.

There are echoes everywhere in Heaven.

Not echoes, perhaps--strings of song, one might call them, or loops, or chains. Voices spun together and arced, endless, into infinity. They build and fall in waves like breath, pulled from somewhere slow, and do not fully fade. There is never silence but when one is in His presence: there are always the voices of angels. The light is colored gold by them, and the clouds and the wind and the sun live by their repetitions.

Earth is a very different place from Heaven. There are no angels, and there are no echoes.

In his first days, Castiel is struck by these facts. Earth is so hot and so silent--he is accustomed to the slow ringing of song at the center of everything, and to be without it sets him off-balance. The echoes are in him, of course, but they are difficult to hear now, not the loud pulse he knows. If he was truly human, he would call them the beating of his heart or the flow of his blood; he is an angel, so he calls them what they are when he thinks of them.

The silence is unsettling, yes. But he has a duty, so on Earth he remains, listening for what he knows. Straining; opening himself wide to catch even the barest brush of Heaven's echoes.

Slowly--without meaning to--he begins to hear other things, too.

Earth grows loud and flushed and vibrant in his ears, its music imprecise and beautifully alive. There are birds and insects, he finds, who call and cry; there are plants, who leap up overnight and sing very softly in the sun. There is the shifting of tectonic plates, far far below everything, like drums grinding. And the rhythmkeepers, under it all: the chorus of billions of breaths scraping up against each other, widening into an ocean.

It is beautiful.

Castiel once believed these shadows of Earth's song to be the faint and ancient echoes of angels; a divine plan had put them here, he had thought, set them into motion like a set of bells. But as he hears the angels coming--the clear shatter-glass noise of barriers breaking, the human's breath beside him--he knows he was mistaken.

Earth is fragile beneath him, singing; the echoes of angels ring in his ears, pure and perfect and unbreakable. They speak of glory.

Earth, Castiel has begun to see, does not care for glory. It speaks only of life.


End file.
